If you struggle with motivation to get your workouts in it might be time to change your perspective.

Start viewing exercise, specifically strength training sessions as a dose of very strong preventive medicine. In fact, it’s the most powerful anti-aging pill you can dose yourself.

Aging is a complex process that takes place in the body over time and involves a wide number of bodily systems. Not being active enough affects the bodily systems clear down to the cellular level where the ability to transfer nutrients and oxygen from the bloodstream to cells is diminished.

If you can’t get enough oxygen out of your blood the quality of your entire life is impacted – not in a positive way!

Vigorous movement is also key to triggering and releasing anti-aging hormones such as HGH – Human Growth Hormone. This important chemical messenger ensures instructions are given to old worn out cells and tissues to be repaired, rebuilt, replaced or renewed. You’re only fooling yourself if you believe you can remain healthy without the constant release of these “youth” promoting hormones renewing cells and tissues. Without these anti-aging warriors, other chemicals take over and instruct the cells to decay, degenerate and die.

Without vigorous exercise, the body assumes/senses that you don’t need your strength any longer and automatically switches into shutdown and degeneration mode. Not a healthy place to be!

Our ancestors didn’t have to consciously put effort into exercising because just the act of daily survival provided all the exercise needed. But, times have changed. No longer does sitting at the desk for hours at a time provide the necessary stimulus our muscles need to grow and thrive or the stimulus for hormones to kick up production. Sure, our lives are easier and more comfortable. Unfortunately, that does not translate into health and vitality.

Just because times have shifted how we get into shape, the underlying need remains the same. In order to experience stellar health, explosive energy and longevity in years, our bodies must be used as intended – actively!

Here’s some warning signs that you need to shift your perspective about exercising from one of disdain and avoidance to seeing exercise as a direct route to stellar health and longevity.

Warning signs:

Being overweight and obese

Excessive belly fat

Lack of endurance

Soft, flabby muscles

Constant fatigue

Chronic low back or joint pain

Increased blood pressure and blood fat levels

Elevated resting rate

Poor circulation

Increased anxiety and depression

Low breathing capacity

From the top of your head to the bottom of your toes, being physically active is the stimulus that gets the human body working its best while preventing it from deteriorating.

If you fail to challenge your joints and muscles to stay strong they will continue to weaken and fail.

* Everything you need to know to slow down and even reverse the aging clock can be found in my anti-aging library of help: “Reclaim Your Longevity.”

For more tools and resources from Carolyn Hansen to assist you in attaining your health and fitness goals and achieving the success you desire in life, please visit:

With advancing age, comes change. However, the changes that occur are accelerated or stalled depending on our actions. Whatever we continually put into play mentally and physically becomes our world…including our health – the foundation of all other things.

If our lives have been sedentary for the most part, then aging means weight gain, lost muscle mass and suffering from aches and pains – all the result of being out of shape. If we have not cared for our body physically, then our diet has likely suffered through the years too. A sedentary lifestyle coupled with poor nutrition is a formula for the early onset of disease and “age acceleration.”

Wearing glasses and hearing aids and engaging in cosmetic surgical procedures as well as dying one’s hair are all popular and effective methods of adapting to some of the “effects” of aging. However, they only ease the effects and do nothing to stop the aging process itself.

The most effective thing that can be done to “reverse the aging process” is to engage in regular strength training exercise.

Muscles are the engines of our body where energy is released, power is produced and movement originates. Because the condition of our engine has a lot to do with the way we look, feel and function, strong muscles are very advantageous and the only way to get strong muscles is to use them.

Muscle mass is mandatory for healthy living and longevity. But, the reality is, you and I (and everyone else) have been losing muscle and gaining fat every day since sometime in our twenties and studies reveal that most of this muscle loss is due to the fact that we’ve stopped doing active things that require muscle power – not because we age. This gradual loss of muscle mass starts a vicious cycle as it weakens the entire body. The immune system, nerve cells, hormones and other chemicals are all negatively affected.

The truth is, if you are not building muscle, then you’re losing it. If your body is not receiving the necessary stimulus to trigger muscle growth, a slow process of muscle atrophy or wasting begins. This loss of muscle tissue directly or indirectly causes the degenerative processes and conditions that characterize the aging process.

In other words, lack of movement is devastating to the human body.

Since most of us are employed in jobs that don’t require maximum use of our muscles, we need to create avenues that actively engage and put them to use. Strength training is the answer.

Only strength training can prevent age-related muscle loss. No other form of exercise or physical activity is adequate. Strength training is not only the most effective exercise in addressing the biomarkers that affect how young we look, but more importantly, how young we feel. It is empowered to reverse many components of the aging process and is probably the single most effective way to lengthen life.

Although aerobic activity helps your heart (the most effective fitness programs consist of strengthening component and a cardiovascular component), they alone fail to stop muscle loss. Just being “active” is not enough either. Becoming stronger is key. It’s what helps you remain active for your entire life.

Strength training makes you stronger and improves the quality of your life no matter when you begin. Even if you are currently enjoying your nineties, strength training can add valuable, active years to your life. In fact, six months of proper strength training has the power to turn back one of the body’s molecular clocks and rejuvenate aging muscles to the extent that they are nearly as powerful as those found in someone much younger.

If you’ve been searching for the perfect anti-aging pill, search no more. Proper strength training exercise can rejuvenate and take years off your chronological age and it’s all natural. In other words, proper exercise adds years to your life and life to your years. It does not matter if you are a 40-year-old runner or 75-year-old retiree when you begin.

Bottom line is this –

Strength is not a luxury as we age. Increasing strength is now a proven way to make the aging process turn around at the genetic level within the cell. It is an absolute necessity for longevity and health. Strong muscles lead to strong bones and increased bone mineral density.

Those that age well and seem younger than their years, retain their lean tissue mass and have a longer life, fewer illnesses, and better mental functioning.

The right exercise program will increase your lean muscle mass, and your metabolic rate – burning more calories and producing more energy. This is the real secret to turning back the aging clock.

Your body has the potential and the power, to slow down the aging process and restore itself to a level of wellness that it may no longer be experiencing. Superior health. the kind that pays off long-term, involves maintaining healthy body weight throughout life, eating a healthy diet, and having sufficient physical activity in our lives.

The information here, when implemented as suggested, will be life changing and you will enjoy greater health like never before.

It’s no secret that sagging, flabby, weak muscles are the result of not doing proper muscle building and maintenance. They add years to the way you look and feel.

When we think about exercising, we think toned muscles, firm thighs and weight loss. Those are all very valid reasons to exercise but most of us are unaware of the health benefits that proper strength training offers our largest organ…our skin. [Read more…]